


Hidden Worlds

by ScriveSpinster



Category: Sunless Sea
Genre: Creepy locations, Ficlet, Gen, Hunter’s Keep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-04
Updated: 2019-02-04
Packaged: 2019-10-22 02:08:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17654006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriveSpinster/pseuds/ScriveSpinster
Summary: It’s not so easy to get lost in the fog as all that.





	Hidden Worlds

The island of Hunter’s Keep is thick with dreams. The wellspring births them, the fog shelters them, and Phoebe breathes them in with every lungful of cool air as she wanders the gardens and cliffside paths of her home.

Her time passes that way, pleasant but lonely; the days blur and blend like ink and watercolor, bright and dark in succession. Ships come in, carrying tales of London and far places, and when they go, they always take a few new tales with them. But though the ships are marvelous machines, Phoebe loves the zailors more. They seem so so _real_ , after all her dreaming, and in their company the island changes. Her own music is lighter on the air, Lucy’s laughter sweeter, and even Cynthia revels in the chance for an audience to her melancholy. It’s like the story of the zee-bat, she thinks, flying through an open hall between two dark windows: for a day, the Keep is alive with the noise of voices and footsteps, the fire lit and the table laden, and all of them drink wine and speak only of love. Then the guests leave again, the fog swirls back from the pools and gullies and the silver light shines from the false moon in the well, and no matter the song that Phoebe chooses, it hardly cuts through the silence.

There are no guests today, only her sisters in the parlor and the maid, who keeps to her own company. Phoebe walks the clifftops in their absence, turning over a bit of verse in her mind; it won’t come out right, but perhaps if she worries at it enough, the words will fall of their own accord into the pattern they ought to take. Behind her, the manor windows glow like lanterns through the grey mist, but the air is clear up here, and she feels a cold wind pass through her – Storm’s regard, a sense of weather shifting. She looks out to zee, twining two long strands of rock-grass into a lover’s knot as she watches the light of a distant ship approaching, and it occurs to her that she cannot remember whether her lost love was ever real, or only a story she wove one day while searching for something else she’s forgotten.

She wonders – does that bother her? Should it?

Her sister Lucy would claim that a fine story told well is as true a thing as a memory, and Cynthia says that love itself is not half so enduring as the tale of a love that never was, and the edge of dreaming, she knows, is not such a terrible place to live. This is her home, and if there are snakes beneath the leaves of their gardens and old gods nesting in their well, she knows not to let them lead her too far from safer paths. It doesn’t bother her, she decides. It shouldn’t. There’s nothing on this island worth fearing.

Only it seems to her that she has been living here in this old house, among all her books and instruments, for a very long time. And she cannot keep count of all the ships that come to land, or mark the faces of every zailor they bring and take away, but when she remembers the dark-eyed young lass who used to bring her contraband books from Khanagian ports, and the freckled gunner who walked with her along the empty shore, the thought settles on her that more ships make port here than ever leave.

That can’t be right. It’s not so easy to get lost in the fog as all that. 

But though the zee is calm, her mind keeps turning back to danger: rocks along the coastline, jagged teeth beneath the water, the things that hide where no light can reach them. This new ship is near enough now to be clear on the horizon, and all she can think of is the ones that left without returning. She wonders where her gunner is now – the Mangrove College, maybe, or Nuncio, or Adam’s Way. Perhaps he found that island in the east, where sun pours down, as stories say, and paints the whole shore golden. Perhaps he’s happy there. Perhaps he’s home.

( _There is no need to think of it. Nothing needs to change._ )

They have only ever been kind to her.

She watches the light draw close, and she is afraid.

**Author's Note:**

> I have _no_ idea what happened in Sunless Sea’s version of Hunter’s Keep, or why, but it certainly was unsettling, and it seems to have something to do with the island being close to Parabola.


End file.
